And with no more words John Scarlett turned his horse briskly down a side lane, just as the sun was rising and beginning to shine ruddily brown through the morning haze. The sails of a score of windmills darted up suddenly black in the level rush of light, and every hissing goose and waddling, matronly hen had a rosy side and a gray side, together with an attenuated shadow which stretched up the dikes and away across the polders. Presently Scarlett and his companion, at the foot of a leafy by-lane, came to the house of the Scot who had married the Flemish wife for the very practical purposes described by Scarlett. The madcap figure in white went forward to the door, while Wat remained behind cackling helplessly with idiot laughter. Scarlett thundered on the warped and sun-whitened deal of the panels with the hilt of his sword. Then, receiving no response, he kicked lustily with his boots and swore roundly at the unseen occupants in a dozen camp dialects. During his harangues, sulky maledictions grumbled intermittently from the house. Presently an upper window flew open, a splash of dirty water fell souse on the warrior, and still more sadly bedraggled the preposterous quixotry of his attire. The temper of the master-at-arms was now strained to the breaking-point. "Sandy Lyall," he cried--and to do him justice, his voice was more full of sorrow than of anger--"Sandy Lyall, of Pittenweem, listen to me, John Scarlett, gin ye dinna come doon this minute and get me a suit o' claes, warm and dry, I'll thraw your dirty Fifish neck--aye, like a twist of rotten straw at a rick-thatching." But even this explicit malediction threatened to go by without effect. But at long and last there looked out of the small diamond-paned window from which the jar of water had fallen the head of a respectable enough woman, who wore a red shawl wrapped round her coarse black hair in the fashion of a nightcap. [Illustration: "SCARLETT THUNDERED ON THE PANELS WITH THE HILT OF HIS SWORD"] "Decent woman," cried Jack Scarlett to her, "is your man at hame?" But the woman, feather-bed sleep yet blinking heavily in her eyes, threw up her hands and shrieked aloud at the unexpected apparition of a man thus mountebanking before her window in white and incomplete skin-tights. Without articulate speech she withdrew her head and fled within. Whereat Scarlett fell to louder knocking than before, exclaiming all the while on the idleness, incapacity, and general uselessness of such men of Fife as had married foreigneering sluts, and especially threatening what he would do to the particular body and soul of Sandy Lyall, sometime indweller in the ancient borough of Pittenweem.